It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of the country's mostpopular Internet bulletin boards from a husband denouncing a college student hesuspected of having an affair with his wife. Immediately, hundreds joined in theattack.

"Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," one person wrote, "to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband."

Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of hisuniversity and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their home.

Why am I interested in the chinavenging phenomenon? Ever since I started working in the area of massively collaborative gaming, people have warned me that one day my smart mobs of gamers might turn from a benevolent collective intelligence to malevolent, out-of-control crazy people. I can't tell you how often I hear that concern voiced. What if they become so enamored of their in-game power that they attempt to harness it, uninvited for real-world interventions?

The thing about alternate reality games and other similar projects is that so far they don't have the moralizing component that seems to be the driving force of the new chinavenging. I want to write more on this topic, and will, post-dissertation.

By the way, in case you're wondering, coining the term does NOT mean I think chinavenging is a good thing. I think it's dreadful and I want to make games for these people so they can channel their mob mentality into a more virtual scenario, and maybe one with more progressive social values.

20 comments:

As much as that article when I read it this morning was strange and kinda frightening, I can definitely see how this happens.

I have been awestruck the times (yes, more than once) when on a messageboard or something, some honest, simple, nice person will rant "I got ripped off by this-and-such ebay scammer! *sad*" and people will respond with "Let's HARNESS the power of the 'net! *finds his real name, address, other aliases, leaves him angry messages, calls police, rants* "

Scary, but true... I'm trying to find a metafilter example of this.... agh can't find it. Well, you get the idea.

Hi Malcolm-- I don't think it' inappropriate at all to name the nation -- not the "race" -- when this is a distinctly national phenomenon. If you look into it further, you will see there is absolutely something unique happening on the Chinese BBS. The thing is, online culture really does have boundaries and different countries are developing their own net cultures. This is especially true in China, of course, where government has so much control over net access. So it's actually quite important to recognize place when talking about some trends, and this is one of those trends. And it most certainly is a different kind of lynch mob. You would be wrong to say this is the same kind of thing as lynch mobs of the south in the U.S. of the 50s for instance. Sometimes it's nice to mark difference.

Fascintating.Hey blatant plug here for a workshop at ubicomp on Exurban Noir. In part the idea is get people to understand the dark side of tech design/applications.http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/meta/exurban-noir/index.html

hmmm... or maybe slash mobs? But I hate to corrupt the benevolence of flash mobs by associating this kind of practice with them. Anyway chinavenging is way more fun to say with an exclamation point at the end. Try shouting it out loud like a battle cry!

Hm, interesting - actually i read a really good article a while back about Koreavenging (just made that word up to go w/ yours) and how it can be pretty brutal to have an online hate campaign against you in South Korea.

This online vengence stuff is definitely something that appears to be happening in the rapid tech-advanced societies in Southeast Asia. High population density + a lot of blogs/websites = some really fast-spreading internet rumors I guess.

As you mention, “different countries are developing their own net cultures” and you point out the government’s control over the Internet as one of China’s defining characteristics. However, in this case, I would argue that the “chinavenging!” phenomenon is largely rooted in the fact that the Internet is one of least controlled outlets for expression in China.

As is widely publicized, outlets for expressing personal opinion in a public forum in China are severely lacking. Political leaders are not directly responsible to voters, traditional media is largely a government mouthpiece and protesting in the streets is the quickest route to a Chinese prison. So, what venue is left for the average Chinese youth to release their frustrations and vent anger?

This is where the Internet, by virtue of its inherent difficulty to control, has provided a public forum for personal expression and often in the negative, “chinavenging!” manifestation that you observe. The Chinese government simply cannot control the Internet as much as the other, more “traditional” public forums. As in many other areas of society, the government has to walk a fine line between allowing the public to vent their frustrations and avoiding a situation which spirals out of control.

I think these phenomena are particularly strong in Asia, due to the cultural concepts surrounding 'loss of face'. It's really difficult in Asian societies to say anything critical, for fear of someone losing face. I suspect doing it online - rather than f2f - makes it easier for Asians to express negative sentiment, and as it is so suppressed in daily life, it comes out even more strongly. Although actually I heard an example of it in Belgium, on music communities, where a person was hounded and criticised for having stolen some equipment.

About Me

I'm a game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster. I make games that give a damn. I study how games change lives. I spend a lot of my time figuring out how the games we play today shape our real-world future. And so I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032. Learn more here in my bio or get my contact information on my contact page.